If you've ever been interested in the price of a house that wasn't
for sale, head over to Reply.com
, a new real estate service that lets you click on just about any
address to find out what it might cost.

This is a brand-new site
and has lots of holes, but we're guessing it's the beginning of a
service that can eventually be the Amazon.com of real estate. The
initial attraction is for buyers who might want to make an
unsolicited offer. Real estate brokers know that many houses that
aren't listed for sale are in fact for sale if someone comes along
with a good offer.

For $25 per unsolicited
offer, Reply will mail it off with a packet of info to the
homeowner. The homeowner either goes online or calls a toll-free
number to find out the details of the offer. You could also just
send them a note on your own.

The site provides maps,
aerial views and lots of other information. You type in an address
and up pops the property, its neighborhood and a probable price. You
get the square footage of the lot and house, the last sale price,
plus background on the demographics and how long the average
resident has lived there. You get crime statistics, typical
household income and school spending per pupil. (You can often get
this kind of information from a community's official Web site.)

There's a lot of
information here, and while it looks like the beginning of something
big, it is very much a work in progress. Almost every other address
we typed in gave information that the area had 50 percent vacant
houses, but we knew there were close to no vacancies. The site has a
lot of bugs and many missing addresses. Still, it's an interesting
business idea, and a way to find out what your house, or your
friend's, is worth.

You can post anonymous
comments about houses, but you have to fill out a form rating the
floor plan, interior condition, etc. This is more than a little
annoying if you know some useful information abut an address, as we
did, but never saw the inside of the house. The restriction of
having to fill out every check box in the comments section makes it
almost useless. We put our comments in anyway, but gave fake ratings
to satisfy all the boxes to be checked. You could also comment on
the neighbors you know, and that should be interesting as all get
out, especially when the lawsuits for defmation of character start
up.

An
Interesting Retail Idea

A new Web business called
Shopster.com is available for people who would like to set up an
online store. Shopster charges $30 a month and a $99 setup
fee. This looks similar to Yahoo, which will let you set up a store
for $40 a month plus a $50 setup fee, but there are important
differences between the two. (To take a look at Yahoo's online
stores, go to
smallbusiness.yahoo.com.)

At Shopster, the site supplies the products and handles the
shipping. Whether the merchandise sells depends on your marketing
abilities. You can select from an inventory of 700,000 products and
list as many as a thousand of them in your online store. You can
choose any domain name that's available for your store name, and
anyone browsing the Web for products will see that one, not
Shopster's. There's a free trial account, so you can test the waters
before signing up.

To find out how others
have been faring with these online stores, sign up for the free
trial and click on the "forums" tab. There are many success stories,
but there are also many tales of woe from people who spent months
marketing their site and were unable to steer enough traffic there
to make it pay. This is much like the experience of traditional new
businesses.

We were impressed
by the look and quality of some of the sites we looked at. These
included one selling just watches, another women's handbags, a store
for MP3 players, a "Hello Kitty" store that sold those collectibles,
and an "RPG" store that sold role playing games, like Dungeons and
Dragons. You can see that the common thread here is that each of
these stores specialized in a single type of product and offered a
wide selection in that area.

A Place to Store
It

Our new favorite site for online
backup is Mozy.com. It's free, easy to use and lets you store up to
2 gigabytes.

To start, you download the Mozy
software from the Web site and put check marks next to a list of
items you want to back up -- the "My Documents" folder,
word processing documents, photos, spreadsheets, etc. These are
backed up and any changes are backed up every 30 minutes as long as
you're online.

The files stay there
unless you go through a month or more without logging in. Then,
everything but the latest backup is erased. You can restore your
backups five times a month per free account. Joy had no problem
backing up files from one computer and then restoring them to
another. If you need more space, you can get 5 gigabytes for $2 a
month or 30 gigabytes for $5 a month.

Mozy works quietly
in the background, but is slow. This shouldn't matter, and didn't
for us, because it doesn't interfere with continuing your work. Mozy
also sends one ad a month to an e-mail address you provide. You can
create any e-mail address you want at Yahoo.com and give them that
one if you want to avoid receiving even one ad.

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